Getting started with CoreOS on Nutanix Community Edition

Containers seem to be the hot trend right now. I needed to get some more experience in this area, and instead of working with a single container machine, I actually wanted to get a “quick” distributed setup going. It wasn’t all that quick to start with, but I now have a working setup that can actually be rolled out and scaled in a pretty quick fashion.

Now, I’m assuming you already know what a container is, and have heard about CoreOS. Here are some quick steps to get you started. I’ll start off with the prerequisites:

You will have your Nutanix CE cluster up and running

You have a VLAN set up with IP address management and a DHCP server on Nutanix CE

Your further steps are relatively simple. First off, we will create an etcd master, the most important thing we need is a fixed IP, so define which IP you want to give it. Obviously we could use the CoreOS cluster discovery mechanism and rely on an internet connection, but I decided to just use my own instance instead.

Note that I’ve copied in the public ssh key from my laptop to get easier access to the VM. Now, save this file as a text file called user_data, and create an iso image using the ways described here. Copy that over to your container on CE using sftp to a controller VM on port 2222. You can use Prism credentials to authenticate.

Next step, create a new VM in Acropolis, attach the CoreOS ISO image as your primary CD drive, and the ISO you just created as the second CD drive, and power on the VM

Now, to create the actual CoreOS cluster, you create a second user_data file, that only contains the following:

2 thoughts on “Getting started with CoreOS on Nutanix Community Edition”

For those of you copying and pasting the config snippets and wondering why nothing is working, make sure to correct the whitespace, as the example is a bit broken. http://yaml-online-parser.appspot.com/ is a solid tool if your IDE doesn’t check for YAML parsing errors.

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